The Warriors Might Still Win, But They'll Never Be Invincible Again

Curry's tantrum was just the latest loopy development in a Warriors postseason where nothing has gone according to plan.

Stephen Curry will not be suspended for hurling his mouthguard into the stands at the tail end of last night's game Game 6 loss to a rampaging LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. To the extent that the NBA is rigged, this comes as little surprise; the league hardly wants its reigning MVP and most popular player out for Game 7 of the Finals. But Curry's tantrum—which only a month ago would've been unimaginable—was just the latest loopy development in a Warriors postseason where nothing has gone according to plan.

These NBA playoffs was, like the regular season, supposed to be marred by inevitability. The Warriors would summarily execute every team in their path, save maybe the San Antonio Spurs, on their way to a second consecutive title. Instead, Golden State's postseason has been anything but a foregone conclusion. They've had to weather Stephen Curry's injuries, a precarious OKC series, Draymond Green's suspension, a super-charged LeBron James—and now they will have to deal with the (largely symbolic) fallout from Curry's incident. It's been, to say the least, a wild ride for a team so accustomed to gliding effortlessly across the surface.

Of course the mouthguard hit some poor fan as punctuation. It marked the exact moment where Curry shed at least some of his cherubic image and, however briefly, crossed over to the dark side. That's just how it goes with Golden State these days. The Curry incident was yet another sharp reversal that undermined what we thought we knew about this team. The Warriors have only sporadically looked like the well-oiled killing machine that tore through competition so effortlessly all season long. Superstar tandems, the very formula that the Warriors team-oriented style was supposed to make obsolete, are their Achilles heel, as we saw first with KD and Russ and are now with LeBron and Kyrie. Draymond Green is a volatile prick. And Curry has a temper.

It's tempting to search for a metaphysical explanation, and if you go that route, the obvious answer is a karmic imbalance finally correcting itself, the incredible boon of 73-9 finally coming home to roost. Far more likely, though, is that the playoffs really are a different animal, especially when the Warriors have zero experience at being such heavy favorites—who does, really? We're not seeing the real Golden State, we're seeing what happens to them under intense pressure and scrutiny. They're revealing both their limitations and their very human fissures. The Warriors aren't bad dudes or frauds. They're just not as inviolate, or as close to perfect, as they once appeared to be.

Admittedly, much of this is in the eye of the beholder. When the long-overdue Warriors backlash hit, the once-lovable team were began to morph into entitled heels. We started looking for reasons to dislike them, or at least see these latest developments in as negative a light as possible. Granted, sports are a cold and unforgiving place where few takes skew positive. But there's a sympathetic version of Golden State's postseason, one where we lament Curry's injury for detracting from the league's overall entertainment, applaud Green's fire, and see the comeback against the Thunder series as heroic, not unnecessary.

Stephen Curry's cockiness was already beginning to catch up with him; despite his aw-shucks demeanor away from the court, his demonstrative behavior in games was beginning to rub some folks the wrong way. That might explain why his inconsistency is fast becoming more of a storyline than his injuries. Granted, last year's Finals supports the theory that Curry, so outstanding throughout the regular season, can come back to Earth at the worst time possible and can lose himself in the clutter in a way that LeBron James occasionally used to get accused of doing. But Curry is so clearly banged-up, and his game so obviously compromised that negative vibes around him make you wonder: Would any outcome restore the Warriors to their former glory?

For starters, this team has to win on Sunday to avoid becoming a punchline. With hubris counted among their many sins, the Warriors would go down in infamy if they couldn't meet the lofty, if wholly reasonable, expectations brought on by their regular season. Watching them disintegrate in plain view hardly inspires confidence, and even if they do pull off a championship (that language alone chills), they'll have narrowly escaped with their reputation intact. If they had convincingly marched through the players with Steph in his current state or knocked off Cleveland minus Draymond, we might still be talking about them as the greatest team ever. Instead, they're fighting to keep themselves respectable.

But even if Golden State does deliver on a title, things will likely never go back to the way they were. The spell has worn off; our naïve enthusiasm, which mirrored the Golden State's own perceived attitude, has soured just enough. They're looking less like a template for the future of basketball and more like a team that was fortunate enough to land Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. The youth of America may still all want to be Curry, but he's hardly as universally beloved as before. Being less than a marvel will do that, fast.

Do some of us wish we could go back to those simpler times, when Stephen Curry made us gasp on every possession and watching the Warriors was akin to a spiritual basketball experience? Sure, but that's not how teams evolve. Anything that sticks around in sports long enough eventually becomes real in all the ugly human ways everything does, and with the onset of reality comes a host of problems, challenges, and hurdles that have to be overcome by the team or athlete—and those of us watching from afar.

When that mouthguard made impact, it was proof that Stephen Curry is human and periodically unlucky, and that the rest of the world just might have to deal with it. If we demand a fresh-scrubbed, upstanding Stephen Curry at every turn, we're going to be disappointed. Then again, maybe that's where the real fun begins.

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